The first words out of my mouth to introduce my lecture on calf feeding and management fell on the confused ears of my translator. I glanced over the attentive faces of village health care workers that sat ready to take notes and  tried again. Flipping through my mental thesaurus, I attempted to find other words […]

Outer Ring Road (ORR) is a fantastic highway that encircles the city of Hyderabad. The medians contain a spectrum of colorful flowers, the lanes are wide, and best of all; traffic maintains a speed greater than 60km/hr. In the first week of my research, I experienced much of this circular road and have now been […]

What do air-conditioned offices and open air livestock sheds have in common? Well not much, but both have been integral locations for my work thus far. After finishing the data collecting portion of my research here, I have moved on to nutritional analysis and report writing while sitting in a desk chair and staring at […]

Pigs were a commonplace road-side decoration in Mulukanoor Village where I had collected my research data, but now as I am back at the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) for data and sample analysis, swine  are few and cattle seem to rule the highway medians leading to downtown Hyderabad. I suppose […]

Spontaneity is a word in the English language, but it truly finds its meaning here in the goat-trodden streets of Mulukanoor Village, Telangana.  After an unexpected cancellation of the morning research on water buffalo milk production, my translator and I decided to go and see the local Veterinary Dispensary. Vet Dispensaries in this area usually […]

In the past two weeks, I have spent my time here in the new state of Telangana observing and honing my research questions at the Mulukanoor Women’s Dairy Cooperative Union.  Mulukanoor is a rural village in the Karimnagar district of Telangana and their dairy cooperative is made up of 20,000 women farmers in a 30km […]

Hello from the JFK airport! I am Gretchen Landin, a 3rd year student at the UPenn School of Veterinary Medicine heading to Hyderabad, India for the rest of the summer! My world for the past two weeks  has been in my hometown of Sugar Grove, PA. This little rural town has more cattle than people […]